Brepols

The essays collected in this volume study the competences and status of late antique notaries, who from simple stenographers acquired responsibilities and growing importance within the imperial court and in the papal chancellery, being charged with drawing up the acts of the consistorium and the ecclesiastical councils, and with preserving and often delivering sensitive documents from Rome to Constantinople. The analysis of their multiple activities and of the functions they occupied, in the imperial and episcopal archives as well as in the libraries of the great Roman domus, also allows us to verify some new hypotheses on the compiler and on the editing of the Collectio Avellana. Since in the Middle Ages, the collection was transcribed into two main manuscripts both preserved in Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana, the essays also try to understand what role the founder of the Monastery, San Pier Damiani, played in preserving this collection.

The Liber de ordine creaturarum is an anonymous Latin work with an Irish provenance that dates back to the seventh century. It presents the creation as the divine handiwork and is notable for serving as both a commentary on the Hexaemeron (Six-day Work) in Genesis and as one of the earliest works of systematic theology. Although previously attributed to Isidore of Seville, the Liber de ordine creaturarum is far more than a mere compilation of 'authorities.' Instead, it emphasizes the inherent order that exists within the creation itself.

As a prehistory to the Nativity accounts of the gospels of Matthew and Luke the Protevangelium of James, dated to the second half of the second century, aimed to fill in alleged gaps in the canonical accounts of Jesus' and his mother's ancestry and births. Thus, it describes the birth of Mary, the mother of Christ, the Annunciation, the Nativity and the death of Zachariah, the high priest and father of John the Baptist.

The edition of the original Greek text has an English version on its facing pages.

The commentary pays particular attention to the early liturgical use of the Protevangelium and to artistic representations of the scenes it describes as these were the main means by which this highly influential text was transmitted throughout the known world. It also questions the usually accepted genre and purpose of the text and suggests that its author may have had a satirical intention or have intended it as an early Christian novelette, using scriptural scenes and themes as his inspiration. Maybe we have approached the Protevangelium of James with solemn faces and have been prepared to carry out serious theological investigations, whereas the many inconsistencies and glaring contradictions so obvious as to be ridiculous might suggest the author's intentions were not quite so grave or weighty.

The Costuma d’Agen (customary laws of the Agenais, in south-west France) compiled in Occitan at various times in the thirteenth century and preserved in the Livre Juratoire, or swearing copy (Bibliothèque municipale d’Agen, MS 42), is here transcribed with an English translation on facing pages. An introduction and an index are included. Appendices provide the text of five chapters “missing” from this manuscript, along with several pertinent charters from Agen and a fuller description of the Livre juratoire by Professor M. Alison Stones, University of Pittsburgh. The manuscript contains many colored illustrations and capitals.

The Costuma emphasizes the power of the local city council, which often seems to override that of the local count. The laws or customs written in the book deal with many topics including jurisdiction, citizenship and military duties, crime, property, civil and criminal procedure, the local wine and salt trades, and local feudal law.

F. R. P. (Ron) Akehurst (B.A. Oxford, 1962, Ph.D. Colorado, 1967, in French; J.D., Minnesota, 1986). A professor of French at Minnesota since 1968. He has published translations of two other medieval French customaries.

Peter the Chanter was a master at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in the late 12th century. Among his many works is The Abel Distinctions, an alphabetized collection that treats key words by ‘distinguishing’ their various symbolic meanings in accordance with the traditions of biblical exegesis. The work was innovative in form and deeply conservative in content. Of special use to preachers who would shape a sermon around such sets of distinctions, it also appealed in general to clerics and laity interested in biblical meaning and allegory. The Abel Distinctions may have been the first collection of its kind; it spawned dozens of imitators through the next two centuries and more. Its immense popularity and influence is indicated by its nearly ninety extant manuscripts.

The source text of this volume appeared in Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaeualis as Petrus Cantor, Distinctiones Abel (CCCM, 288-288A). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.

King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) remains a key figure in English literary history. Although his reputation as a scholar who was personally responsible for the translation of a number of Latin works is no longer secure, the figure of the wise king nevertheless casts a long shadow over vernacular writing from the late ninth century through to the twelfth. This volume takes stock of recent developments and debates in the field of Alfredian scholarship and showcases new directions in research. Individual chapters consider how English authors before, during, and after Alfred’s reign translated and adapted Latin works, often in innovative and imaginative ways. Other contributions provide new contexts and connections for Alfredian writing, highlighting the work of Mercian scholars and expanding the corpus beyond the works traditionally attributed to the king himself. Together, these essays force us to rethink what we mean by ‘Alfredian’ and to revise the literary history of the ‘long ninth century’.

This book explores the role of glazed terracotta sculpture in Renaissance Italy, from c. 1450 to the mid-1530s. In its brightness and intense colour glazed terracotta strongly attracted the viewer’s gaze. Its pure and radiant surfaces also had the power to raise the mind and soul of the faithful to contemplation of the divine. The quasi-magical process of firing earthenware coated with tin-based paste, promoted initially by imports from the East, was seized upon by Luca della Robbia, who realised that glazed terracotta was the ideal vehicle for the numinous. He began to create sculptures in the medium in the 1430s, and continued to produce them for the rest of his life. After Luca’s death, his nephew, Andrea della Robbia, inherited his workshop in Florence and continued to develop the medium, together with his sons. The book considers some of the large-scale altarpieces created by the Della Robbia family in parallel with a number of small-scale figures in glazed terracotta, mostly made by unidentified sculptors. The captivating illustrations integrate these two categories of glazed terracotta sculpture into the history of Italian Renaissance art. By focusing on a specific artistic medium which stimulated piety in both ecclesiastical and domestic contexts, this book offers new ways of thinking about the religious art of the Italian Renaissance. The links it establishes between lay devotion and the creation of religious images in glazed terracotta invite reassessment of habitual distinctions between private and public art.

Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), descendant of a wealthy and well-known family of bankers, inherited quite young, through a series of unpredictable circumstances, the enormous fortune of Thomas Coutts, her maternal grand-father. She spent most of her long life in London, where she occupied a prominent position in society, becoming well-known not only for her splendid life-style and her important literary and political acquaintances, as, for instance, Charles Dickens and Admiral Nelson, but also for her active role as a philanthropist. This book explores a little-known side of her life; although she did not know Greek, she became the owner of ca. 100 Greek manuscripts, mostly theological, datable between the tenth and the sixteenth century, a part of which she donated to Highgate School. The manuscripts, with all the Baroness's possessions, were dispersed at auction in 1921 and in 1987 and are now mainly divided between American and European University Libraries. This book has identified for the first time the Baroness's Greek manuscripts, located and described them in detail, with special attention to their script style and their origin, adding to their description one or two plates of each codex.

A silver-tongued assassin, a motherly prophetess, a consecrated strongman unable to resist the charms of foreign women: the Anglo-Norman Bible’s Book of Judges features a roll-call of unlikely heroes. At the book’s core is a cycle of saviour stories. Twelve times the Israelites embrace foreign gods, succumb to neighbouring enemies, repent and are delivered by a ‘judge’. As Israel itself descends into ever-greater religious, moral and political decay, the narrative pattern also unravels. The book ends bleakly, with stories of rape, murder and civil war. The stage is set for a king.

Gideon-a doubting Thomas who repeatedly ‘tests’ God-and Samson-lion-killer and lover of Delilah-were firm medieval favourites. Their tales and those of other flawed judges inspired heroic deeds on the battlefield and provided lessons on how to behave (and indeed how not to behave). With its remarkable heroines, moreover-from cut-throat Jael, who wields a tent-peg to devastating effect, to Jephthah’s dignified daughter, sacrificed because of her father’s rash vow-this is a book that prompted much reflection in the Middle Ages on the place of women in society.

The Anglo-Norman Bible’s Book of Judges survives in two fourteenth-century manuscripts: British Library Royal MS 1 C III (L), noted for its multilingual glosses, and the richly illustrated Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1 (P). The critical text, based on L, has been prepared by Pitts. An introduction and notes by Grange aim to elucidate and interpret the Anglo-Norman Bible’s Book of Judges for the modern reader.

The psalms are at the heart of Christian devotion, in the Middle Ages and still today. Learned early and sung weekly by every medieval monastic and cleric, the psalms were the language Christ and his ancestor David used to speak to God. Powerful and plaintive, angry and anguished, laudatory and lamenting: the psalms expressed the feelings and thoughts of the individuals who devised them and those who sang them privately or publicly in Anglo-Saxon England many generations later. Psalters from Anglo-Saxon England are the largest surviving single group of manuscripts, and also form a very significant percentage of the fragments of manuscripts extant from the period. Psalters were central to the liturgy, particularly for the daily Office, and were the first schoolbooks for the learning of Latin and Christian doctrine. Moreover, from Anglo-Saxon England comes the earliest complex of vernacular psalter material, including glossed and bilingual psalters, complete psalter translations, and poems based on individual psalms and on psalmic structures. The lament psalms are remarkably similar to the Old English elegies in both form and imagery, and the freedom with which vernacular adaptors of the psalms went about their work in Anglo-Saxon England suggests an appropriation of the psalter not as the sacred and unchanging Word but as words that could be turned to use for meditation, study, reading, and private prayer. Worth investigation are both individual figures who used the psalms such as Bede, Alfred, and Ælfric, and also the unknown compilers and scribes who developed new layouts for psalter manuscripts and repurposed earlier or Continental manuscripts for use in Anglo-Saxon England. In Latin and in the vernacular, these codices were central to Anglo-Saxon spirituality, while some of them also continued to be used well into the later Middle Ages.

How are we to regard our body? As a prison, an enemy, or, maybe, an ally? Is it something bad that needs to be humiliated and extinguished, or should one see it as a huge blessing, that deserves attention and care? Is the body an impediment to human experience of God? Or, rather, does the body have a crucial role in this very experience? Alexandros Chouliaras’ book The Anthropology of St Gregory Palamas: the Image of God, the Spiritual Senses, and the Human Body argues that the fourteenth-century monk, theologian, and bishop Gregory Palamas has interesting and persuasive answers to offer to all these questions, and that his anthropology has a great deal to offer to Christian life and theology today.

Amongst this book’s contributions are these: for Palamas, the human is superior to the angels concerning the image of God for specific reasons, all linked to his corporeality. Secondly, the spiritual senses refer not only to the soul, but also to the body. However, in Paradise the body will be absorbed by the spirit, and acquire a totally spiritual aspect. But this does not at all entail a devaluing of the body. On the contrary, St Gregory ascribes a high value to the human body. Finally, central to Palamas’ theology is a strong emphasis on the human potentiality for union with God, theosis: that is, the passage from image to likeness. And herein lies, perhaps, his most important gift to the anthropological concerns of our epoch.

This work will offer a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the origin and development of the Apostles' Creed (symbolum apostolorum), the first to appear since Kelly's Early Christian Creeds (1950). Westra offers a concise Forschungsgeschichte, gathers the fruits of more recent literature, and critically discusses the work of Markschies, Kinzig, and Vinzent (Tauffragen und Bekenntnis), who presented a completely novel theory on the origin of the Apostles' Creed in 1999.

A new feature in Westra's work is its discussion of the phenomenon of credal change - a long-felt need, as the different variants. How did these variants originate, and how did they develop over the course of the centuries in the different parts of th Western Church?

Consequently, Westra presents an elaborate overview of these different variants. He discusses the testimony of wellknown authors such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Rufinus anew, and also draws attention to a number of hitherto neglected or even unknown sources, thus replacing (at least as far as the Apostles' Creed is concerned) Hahn's Bibliothek der Symbole.

The Cistercian abbeys of northern England provide some of the finest monastic remains in all of Europe, and much has been written on their twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture. The present study is the first in-depth analysis of the art and architecture of these northern houses and nunneries in the late Middle Ages, and questions many long-held opinions about the Order’s perceived decline during the period c.1300-1540. Extensive building works were conducted between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries at well-known abbeys such as Byland, Fountains, Kirkstall, and Rievaulx, and also at lesser-known houses including Calder and Holm Cultram, and at many convents of Cistercian nuns. This study examines the motives of Cistercian patrons and the extent to which the Order continued to enjoy the benefaction of lay society.

Featuring over a hundred illustrations and eight colour plates, this book demonstrates that the Cistercians remained at the forefront of late medieval artistic developments, and also shows how the Order expressed its identity in its visual and material cultures until the end of the Middle Ages.

The conquest and settlement of lands in eastern England by Scandinavians represents an extreme migratory episode. The cultural interaction involved one group forcing themselves upon another from a position of military and political power. Despite this seemingly dominant position, by 900 CE the immigrants appear to have largely adopted the culture of the Anglo-Saxons whom they had recently defeated. Informed by migration theory, this work proposes that a major factor in this assimilation was the emigration point of the Scandinavians and the cultural experiences which they brought with them.

Although some of the Scandinavians may have emigrated directly from Scandinavia, most of the first generation of settlers apparently commenced their journey in either Ireland or northern Francia. Consequently, it is the culture of Scandinavians in these regions that needs to be assessed in searching for the cultural impact of Scandinavians upon eastern England. This may help to explain how the immigrants adapted to aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture, such as the issuing of coinage and at least public displays of Christianity, relatively quickly. The geographic origins of the Scandinavians also explain some of the innovations introduced by the migrants, including the use of client kings and the creation of ‘buffer’ states.

Some modern commentators welcome the alleged approach of the “post-human” era as a liberation from the constraints of essentialist identity. Others lament it as a harbinger of the death of the soul. But both groups will find it instructive to consider that the nature of humanity has always been a contested topic. The chapters collected here suggest that the emergence of the modern idea of the human was at least as fraught a process as its putative demise.

David Hawkes and Richard G. Newhauser have selected a wide array of contributions for this volume. Renowned scholars from several disciplines have produced a series of fascinating essays, which concentrate on the relation between humanity and nature as it was understood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The issues they examine range from poaching to flatulence, from Aztec animal symbolism to Jesus’s grandmother, from tulips to the Trinity.

Some chapters examine a wide variety of popular texts, from the bloody legend of Robert the Devil to the sinister magic of the Anglo-Saxon “wen charm”, from Lutheran Books of Nature to Emperor Maximillian’s wedding. The result is a book that raises intriguing implications for the modern struggle over the meaning of mankind.

In recent years a lively debate has developed on the features of Byzantine historiography. The increasingly dominant tendency today is to treat historical texts more as pleasant literary narratives than as systematic historical accounts of the political and military history of Byzantium. The present study aims to contribute to this debate by revisiting the voices of the Byzantine authors themselves, focusing on the extant historical prefaces from the Early, Middle, and Late Byzantine eras. This seemed timely, more than a century after the publication of Ηeinrich Lieberich’s fundamental work on Byzantine historiographical proems.

Obviously, not all prefaces are of equal interest: some serve a purely conventional function, while others are composed more thoughtfully and merit more careful attention. The book’s goal is twofold: firstly, to outline the details of the prefatory function of the Byzantine historiographical proems as microtexts; secondly, to detect and evaluate the theoretical views expressed by the authors of each period regarding the genre of Byzantine historiography. This will expand our knowledge of how the Byzantines wrote (praxis) and thought (culture) about historiography.

The Glossa in Apocalypsin (Cambridge Gloss on the Apocalypse) is a recently-discovered anonymous Hiberno-Latin (that is, authored by an Irish cleric writing in Latin) commentary on the Apocalypse of John found in a tenth-century manuscript at Cambridge University Library. This gloss is written in a similar style to other Irish-authored exegetical texts of the same period. That is, the author proceeds verse by verse through the entire Apocalypse, citing short phrases or even single words of the biblical text, followed by brief explanations that serve to clarify meaning and are often moral or allegorical in nature, as well as offering alternative interpretations of a given passage. The text has a marked dependence on the hermeneutical method of the fourth-century Donatist Tyconius as laid out in his Liber Regularum (Book of Rules), and applied in his Exposition on the Apocalypse. The Cambridge Gloss promotes an ecclesiological and spiritual interpretation of the Apocalypse, muting speculation about an imminent endtime scenario. The gloss contains numerous references to heretics, emphasises the hierarchy and the privileged role of teachers within the church, and likely dates from the eighth century, the ‘Northumbrian Golden Age’, exemplified by the works of Bede the Venerable and Alcuin of York. This English translation (accompanied by numerous notes) is intended to give readers an insight into understanding the viewpoint that medieval exegetes held in explaining the Apocalypse of John.

The source text of this volume appeared in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina as Glossa in Apocalypsin e codice Bibliothecae Vniuersitatis Cantabrigiensis Dd.X.16 (CCSL 108G). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.

This book presents samples of experimental methods for reading medieval Latin texts that have scarcely been adopted, if at all, by mainstream research in the field. It contributes to the discovery of some underestimated aspects of early medieval (especially Carolingian) Latin literature: intertextuality as intercultural relationship (in Biblical epic), intermediality (text-image-sound connections), interdisciplinarity (science, religion, and poetry), hermeneutics (Biblical exegesis as poetry-engine), post-colonial reading (medieval Latin as a second language), socio-literary approaches (monastic epigraphs as witnesses of everyday life, writing as a status symbol of an intellectual class and a whole civilization). It also discusses quantitative methods, which are explored in more detail in a second volume, Digital Philology and Quantitative Criticism of Medieval Literature: Unconventional Approaches to Medieval Latin Literature II): http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503588018-1.

The book thus seeks to encourage scholarly interest in obscure or less familiar elements of the Carolingian literary renewal, interpreted here as more a laboratory of innovations than a revival of traditional patterns.

This book explores the legend of Adam’s Contract with Satan that was made after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.This legend was current in the Eastern Orthodox churches of SE Europe as well as in the Caucasus. Unknown forms of the legend have been found in two traditions, the Romanian and the Armenian, and are investigated here. Notably this legend has found its way into folk stories and sometimes into folk music, showing how widely it was accepted and distributed. This legend also inspired images in both traditions. In Romania the most striking illustrations are to be found in Bukovina province, in frescos on the famous painted churches of that region, as well as in manuscripts. In Armenia features of this story are incorporated into the iconography of the Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan.

The Christian Topography of Early Islamic Jerusalem: The Evidence of Willibald of Eichstätt (700-787 CE) is an analysis of Willibald’s description of Jerusalem for the year 724-6, as contained in Hugeburc’s Vita Willibaldi, a text composed in Heidenheim (Germany) in 778. The work makes a fresh examination of the Christian landscape of Early Islamic Jerusalem, while describing various aspects of the Byzantine and Crusader city. Willibald’s account of the Holy City includes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of Holy Sion, the pool of Bethesda, the Church of St Mary, the Church of the Agony and the Church of the Ascension. Particular attention is given to the monument of the Miraculous Healing (the legend of the Holy Cross), the portico of Solomon, the Jephonias Monument (the Dormition of Mary) and the Jerusalem circuit.

At the same time, the work explores the religious imagination of Willibald, including his perceptions of the holy sites, his image of Jerusalem and his understanding of the Christian life. Willibald’s image of the city as a far and distant place is supported by his attention to personal hardships and to his interactions with the ‘pagan Saracens’, while embedded within the tales of his oriental travels is his vision of the Christian life - whereas Willibald viewed the earthly life as a laborious journey, the Christian life was one of faithful perseverance.

The work makes a significant contribution to two fields of study: the commemorative topography of Jerusalem and the Anglo-Saxon, or Boniface, mission in Germany.

Rodney Aist is a scholar of Christian pilgrimage, both past and present, with a particular expertise in the city of Jerusalem.

The chronicles of medieval Wales are a rich body of source material offering an array of perspectives on historical developments in Wales and beyond. Preserving unique records of events from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, these chronicles form the essential narrative backbone of all modern accounts of medieval Welsh history. Most celebrated of all are the chronicles belonging to the Annales Cambriae and Brut y Tywysogyon families, which document the tumultuous struggles between the Welsh princes and their Norman and English neighbours for control over Wales.

Building on foundational studies of these chronicles by J. E. Lloyd, Thomas Jones, Kathleen Hughes, and others, this book seeks to enhance understanding of the texts by refining and complicating the ways in which they should be read as deliberate literary and historical productions. The studies in this volume make significant advances in this direction through fresh analyses of well-known texts, as well as through full studies, editions, and translations of five chronicles that had hitherto escaped notice.

Considered the most important French Renaissance church, Saint-Eustache in Paris has long remained an enigma. What new circumstances allowed its parishioners, long desirous of a new church, suddenly to begin buiding it 1532? Did Francis I play a role? Was the obscure Jean Delamarre possibly its architect? Could the ideas of the Italian theorist, Serlio, have affected his design? These and other key issues are resolved by the author in a sustained reading of all known evidence. The baffling formal complexity of the church is clarified through lucid analysis that employs hundreds of new photographs executed by the author. The building is studied within the context of sixteenth-century French architecture and its roots in antiquity, the Italian Renaissance, Romanesque and Gothic France, and the Flamboyant Style. Sankovitch’s work will serve as a standard for all those who desire to understand this mysterious building and its times. A bright, clear window revealing an unseen architecture, previously an invisible - or at best murky - episode in the history of art, it is a portal to all future research on the building, and a key to the architectural life of the period.

Medievalists and Renaissance specialists contribute to this compelling volume examining how and why the classics of Greek and Latin culture were taught in various Western European curricula (including in England, Scotland, France,Germany, and Italy) from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. By analysing some of the commentaries, glosses, and paraphrases of these classics that were deployed in medieval and Renaissance classrooms, and by offering greater insight into premodern pedagogic practice, the chapters here emphasize the ‘pragmatic’ aspects of humanist study. The volume proposes that the classics continued to be studied in the medieval and Renaissance periods not simply for their cultural or ‘ornamental’ value, but also for utilitarian reasons, for ‘life lessons’. Because the volume goes beyond analysing the educational manuals surviving from the premodern period and attempts to elucidate the teaching methodology of the premodern period, it provides a nuanced insight into the formation of the premodern individual. The volume will therefore be of great interest to scholars and students interested in medieval and Renaissance history in general, as well as those interested in the history of educational theory and practice, or in the premodern reception of classical literature.

The rise of modern science and European colonial and imperial expansion are indisputably two defining elements of modern world history. James E. McClellan III and François Regourd explore these two world-historical forces and their interactions in this comprehensive and in-depth history of the French case in the Old Regime presented here for the first time. The case is key because no other state matched Old-Regime France as a center for organized science and because contemporary France closely rivaled Britain as a colonial power, as well as leading all other nations in commodity production and participating in the slave trade.

Based on extensive archival research and vast primary and secondary literatures and sharply reframing the historiography of the field, this landmark volume traces the development and significance for early-modern history of the Colonial Machine of Old-Regime France, an unparalleled agglomeration of institutions geared to the success of the French colonial enterprise, including the Royal Navy, the Académie Royale des Sciences, the Jardin du Roi, and a host of related specialist institutions working together at home and overseas. Mainly supported by the French state, the Colonial Machine reveals itself through its actions from the time of Colbert and Louis XIV as it grappled with fundamental problems facing contemporary European colonialism: cartography and navigation; medical care of sailors, colonists, and slaves; and applied botany and commodity production.

Historians of globalization and European overseas expansion, of Old-Regime France, and of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will henceforth take this stimulating volume as a necessary starting point for further reflection and research.

The Ancient Egyptians used it for both the living and the dead, the Greeks and Romans used it to signal their status, and it aided the Vikings in reaching the far shores of Europe and Eurasia. Textiles have surrounded us, literally and figuratively for millennia, but this common thread has long been ignored in scholarly research. With the inception of the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen in 2005, however, this approach changed fundamentally, and today, every type of research discipline comes together to begin unravelling the stories told by textiles. How do we understand textiles and how do we talk about them? Who produced textiles, where, and for what purposes? How do we conduct research into the origins of materials? How did cultivating flax or raising sheep change the ancient landscape? How have we researched textiles so far? What can we learn from textiles about society, gender, and production? This volume engages with these questions and explores how the fabric of society has changed through researching textiles in all its facets, from archaeology and history to natural sciences. Taking as its starting point the research interests and career of its honorand, Eva Andersson Strand, this meticulously researched volume consists of three parts, covering the tools and techniques that form the basis of all research explores; how craftspeople made use of tools and techniques; and how textiles have been used over millennia to signify identity and status.